The Chantry, South Street, Bridport.

I’VE WRITTEN before on this site about how Bridport’s oldest building – The Chantry in South Street – almost certainly began life as a seamark or primitive lighthouse.

Then, when it was converted to a priest’s house, one of the priest’s duties was to say regular masses to St Catherine.

That’s significant because, as the Dorset coastal historian Gordon Le Pard has noted, “St Katherine is the dedication of both the chapel at Abbotsbury, built as a sea mark, as well as the only certain medieval lighthouse on St Catherine’s Down on the Isle of Wight.”

St Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury. Photograph by Graham Horn, reused under Creative Commons licence.

But, is there even more to this connection?

Right back in Edwardian times, before the First World War, an unusual young man called Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford used to visit a Bohemian couple called Harold and Charlotte Peake, who lived in Boxford near Newbury.

The Peakes, says Kitty Hauser, in Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, 2008), were “comfortably off… spurned organized religion, worse sandals and went in for vegeterianism, Japanese art, the resuscitation of folk-rituals and the re-organization of mass society.”

And they also ran a sort of pagan cult based around St Catherine, as Hauser explains.

“Harold Peake had the idea that churches dedicated to Catherine had replaced sites where an earlier deity called Llud (known to the Romans as Nodens) was worshipped.

“Peake came to this conclusion because Llud – the Celtic god of the Severn estuary, associated with healing – shared St Catherine’s symbol of a wheel; the idea was reinforced by the high incidence of chapels dedicated to St Catherine that overlook a harbour or have a good view of the sea, since Llud had many of the characteristics of the sea god Poseidon.

“Somehow the Peakes and their visitors honoured this pagan connection by performing ceremonies in which they  walked round in circles lighting fires, loking out for ‘Kataric portents’, and signing off their letters with a wheel symbol, ‘yours in Kata’, and so on.”

St Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury. Photograph by Jim Champion, reused under Creative Commons licence.

Now, St Catherine’s Chapel at Abbotsbury clearly has a very good view of the sea indeed, and the Chantry used to be right by the river at the edge of Bridport.

So are these sites connected in some way with old Celtic and Roman gods? Or is it all just a coincidence?

Crawford believed that nothing ever quite disappears. There are always clues, if only we have the tools and the skills to interpret them. In the case of Bridport and Abbotsbury, is it the name of St Catherine that carries the trace of ancient ways of life across the centuries?

A bit more about Crawford and Hauser’s book. Crawford was the Ordnance Survey’s first Archaeology Officer, back in 1920. He got the job after serving in the Great War as an Intelligence Officer, where he developed a fantastic eye for landscape features, and what they could mean. He was brilliant at fieldwork, and as Hauser writes, his work in Dorset (and other counties) “put British prehistoric archaeology quite literally on the map.” As founder and editor of the journal Antiquity he also published the work of Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated Maiden Castle during the 1930s. Hauser writes superbly about the excitements of field archaeology and photography, and her book is highly recommended.

One final point: if you want to spot things in a landscape anywhere in Britain, Crawford reckoned that dry afternoons in March were best.

Just what we’re getting at the moment…

FOR MORE than seven long years the Literary & Scientific Institute in Bridport town centre has stood empty. Now though, the Bridport Area Development Trust has been given a chance to seek new uses for a building erected in the early 1830s as a Mechanics Institute, whose purpose was to help Bridport’s working classes educate themselves. In 1855 it become a more middle-class Literary and Scientific Institute; in the late 19th century it was an art school; in the late 20th a Dorset County Council library.

About 25 people are due to look round inside to dream and to calculate what might be. The pictures shown here need little commentary, but you’ll find the occasional note of explanation and literary tag.

All pictures were taken by Vince O’ Farrell of Bridport Area Development Trust, with whose kind permission they are now reproduced.

“Classical, that’s it – it is calm and classical… No low beatings and knockings about” (Mrs Jarley in Dickens’ The Old Curiosty Shop).

One of the reasons we know that the Institute was built in the early 1830s is that a book about Baptist churches published in 1835 complained that it made the garden setting of the chapel right by it, pictured below, less attractive to visitors.

The same book (by one  J. Murch) commented nonetheless on what “a handsome and commodious edifice” the new Institute  was.

“The scene was the familiar one of grandeur and desolation” (The End, Samuel Beckett).

Old buildings “were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling” (Images, T E Hulme). 

“… And immediately

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

“The sun-comprehending glass,

“And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

“Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

(High Windows, Philip Larkin)

THIS is a story about remarkable things. Firstly, in glorious defiance of the recession, courses costing at least £265 per person start in West Dorset in February and March on the subject of the Mythic Imagination – things like daimons, fairylore, and the otherworld (“the neglected Western tradition of soul-making… described by Plato”). The first weekend course has already sold out.

The second remarkable thing is that this seemingly arcane tradition in fact links West Dorset to phenomena including the sex life of Sir Walter Ralegh, the birth of the British Empire and the Vietnam War…

Let’s start in Long Street, Cerne Abbas, with this former bakery, named Raleigh House in an anecdotal village guide put together by the Cerne Abbas Historical Society.

 “In the early 1600s,” the guide states, “Sir Walter Raleigh was summoned to Saint Mary’s parish church on a minor ecclesiastical offence. It has been told that before the meeting, the family invited Sir Raleigh [sic] to rest in their home from his journey to Cerne Abbas. Thus the name remains to celebrate their famous visitor.”

A nice enough English village story, but is it true?

Sweet Sir Walter Ralegh

Sir Walter Ralegh was a lusty man, nicknamed ‘Swisser Swatter’ after the cries supposedly moaned by a woman with whom he was heard vigorously swiving. Try saying ‘Sweet Sir Walter’ in a faster and faster rhythm and see what you end up with…      

Anyway, it was the carnal desires of Swisser Swatter that brought him down to Dorset in the 1590s. Ralegh had been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, but in 1592 he secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, who were meant to be virgins.

Ralegh and his wife were punished by two months imprisonment in the Tower of London, and on his release Ralegh was forbidden to attend the Royal Court.

Sherborne Castle

He retired to Sherborne Castle in West Dorset, where such heretical and free-thinking conversations were rumoured to be held with his entourage that in 1594 allegations of atheism were formally investigated by the authorities in hearings at Cerne Abbas. Reports of Ralegh’s conversations – particularly one at Wolfeton Castle near Dorchester – had been scandalising Dorset. And scandalising is the word.

Atheism was then punishable by death.

For witnesses to suggest that Ralegh had been arguing about subjects such as “the beinge, or immortalitye of the soule” meant there was more at stake than “a minor ecclesiastical offence.”  

Ralegh got off, for various reasons. For a start, the people investigating him were mostly personal friends; one commissioner was even related to him.

Still, the affair left Ralegh even more restlessly discontented, and even more determined, as the writer John Shirley puts it, “to regain the affection of the Queen and the respect of his neighbours.”

So, he planned an expedition to Guiana, in search of the golden world of Eldorado, and in 1595 he sailed to South America (an adventure written vaingloriously up in The Discoverie of Guiana).

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's brilliant imperial epic Aguirre, Wrath of God

Ralegh’s voyage has been described by the historian Simon Schama as “the prototype of all imperial upstream epics”. It’s passed down through time into the imaginations of such figures as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), John Huston (The African Queen), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God), and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now).

Ralegh’s journey was a kind of alchemical, occult Neo-platonist field-trip, undertaken partly under the guidance of the magus Dr John Dee, the first person in British history known to have used the term ‘British Empire’.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to think about this: one of the reasons the British Empire began was that Walter Ralegh was fed up of living in West Dorset.

Ralegh was enthused by and infused with the magical outlook of occult Neoplatonists, whose influence in Britain peaked in the late 16th century, and whose dominant idea was (to quote the historian Keith Thomas) that “by mystical regeneration it was possible for man to regain the domination over nature which he had lost at the Fall,” ie upon the expulsion from Paradise.

All this history has now been almost entirely forgotten, but it forms the Dorset background to a series of courses being held in the 16th century panelled Oak Room at the Fox and Hounds in Cattistock. Speakers include Patrick Harpur, who lives at Frampton between Maiden Newton and Dorchester, and is the author of The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Penguin).

You can read more about the Mythic Imagination courses by clicking on this link.

Editor’s Note: I should add that I’m not involved with the courses, and as far as I’m aware they have almost nothing to do with the West Dorset background I’ve sketched out. I’ve written about it because I felt like it (!), and because I think it’s interesting. If any readers would like more details about some of the points I’ve raised (eg fuller references), then please send an email or leave a comment.

Does it look like a lighthouse to you? The Chantry, on South Street, behind the lit streetlamp and the red three-wheeler.

THE oldest and perhaps the oddest place you can stay in Bridport is the Chantry, down South Street. It’s let out by the Vivat Trust who mention in passing that it may once have been a primitive lighthouse…

This suggestion is oft-repeated but no one – until recently – ever seems to have stopped and thought: Hang on a minute, how on earth would that work? It doesn’t look like a lighthouse – it’s more than a mile from the sea – where would the light have gone – who would have seen it – and how would they have used it?

Such questions have now been answered in a beautifully simple way by the Chickerell-based Dorset coastal historian, Gordon Le Pard.

First, a quick bit of background. The Chantry dates from about 1300. In those days Bridport’s harbour was close to the medieval town, up the River Brit. Firelight from the top of the Chantry could have acted as a guide.

Bright fire could have burned in an iron fire basket on top of a pole fixed to the south side of the Chantry. On the south side there is an odd-shaped corbel, with “a small round socket in the center of its upper face… aligned beneath a larger circular cut-out in the projecting offset course at second floor level.” This is where a pole would fit. (Archaeologist KA Rodwell surveyed these features in detail; click here to read more from her).      

Anyway, when a new Bridport Harbour was created down at the mouth of the River Brit (where West Bay now is), it seems the Chantry still served as a lighthouse.

So how did it work? This is the clever bit.

Gordon Le Pard notes that two reefs lie just offshore from West Bay, the Ram to the west and the Pollock to the east. They could be dangerous; in the 17th century, the Ram wrecked an armed merchantman, whose remains still linger on the seabed.

Now look at this diagram, which takes into account the historic positions of the East and West cliffs at West Bay, and how they would block the view from sea towards the Chantry:

As Mr Le Pard says: “If you draw lines between the Chantry and the present East Cliff it marks the edge of the Ram, if between the Chantry and the approximate former location of the West Cliff, it marks the edge of the Pollock.

“So a captain steering for Bridport Harbour only had to keep the Chantry in view to avoid either of the reefs.”

Isn’t that smart?

One other thing. When the Chantry was adapted to serve as a priest’s house, one of the priest’s duties was to say regular masses to St Katherine.

Mr Le Pard comments: “St Katherine is the dedication of both the chapel at Abbotsbury, built as a sea mark, as well as the only certain medieval lighthouse on St Catherine’s Down on the Isle of Wight.”

No one will ever know for sure whether the Chantry was a lighthouse as well as a sea mark, but Mr Le Pard finds the evidence he has amassed “especially pleasing” – and so (I think) should all the rest of us.

You can find out more about Mr Le Pard’s research in the latest volumes (numbers 129 & 130) of the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, that is the society which runs the excellent Dorset County Museum in Dorchester.

Unfolded waves of hessian shows beans like cowrie shells

A PILE of hessian sacks filled with raw coffee beans are stacked up on a wooden crate in the corner, while a traditional roasting machine churns its first load of coffee of the day, and the bitter-sweet aroma of freshly-roasted coffee fills the air. 

I almost expect a rugged explorer to come climbing out of a plantation, with a glowing jar of nature’s brightest protruding from his backpack.

Giles Dick-Read. The Read family name can be traced back generations through Reads Flour Millers, of Norwich

Instead I find myself looking on as coffee connoisseur and founder of Reads Coffee, Giles Dick-Read, moves deftly around a converted milking parlour close to his rural home.    

Giles and his wife Charlotte operate their roast-to-order business from their home at Limekiln Farm, just outside of Sherborne. So how did a quintessentially English couple bring a taste of the exotic to the Dorset countryside, and why?

Having set up shop in Oxfordshire eight years ago, the couple, who hail from Buckinghamshire, moved down to Dorset nearly five years ago to be nearer their families.

Charlotte and Giles pause for a chat. A typical working day lasts for ten hours, roasting, bagging, installing machines in cafes, making deliveries... At weekends, they visit farmers' markets or events within a 40-mile radius of Sherborne

Giles said: “What we like about Dorset the most is that there are lots of ‘foodie’ people here – so many are extremely enthusiastic about eating and drinking great produce.”

During a trip around America and Canada in the early 1990s, just as Starbucks was exploding across the USA, and on his return to the UK Giles found himself frustrated: he could not find a decent coffee anywhere.  

A discussion with the doctor about the side effects of caffeine convinced him that good quality Arabica coffee offered a healthier choice, as opposed to the cheaper Robusta coffees, which often have a far higher caffeine content.

So, as his quest for the perfect coffee began, he worked for various coffee operators, including Whittards, before joining Pret A Manger as its coffee man, where he stayed for several years developing the company’s coffee trade.

“I have done a lot of work with cafes, training baristas and educating operators about the mechanics of coffee making – choosing the right coffee, getting the best from their machines, and perfecting how coffee should be prepared.

Records are kept of every coffee roasted

“Great coffee can be a work of art – it is really very simple, but to do it well takes a lot of practice and experience. The skill lies in how it is prepared.  People often say that Italy has the best coffee. The reality is that the Italians really just know how to serve it properly.”

"Great coffee can be a work of art..."

So this is what their business offers: Roast-to-order single estate Arabica coffees, advice for users about coffee-making equipment, personal delivery services, and training about how to perfect the art of making a great cup of coffee.

While working at Pret, Giles met coffee roasters and brokers from around the world, learning first hand from them about sourcing coffee beans by working closely with brokers, to ensure quality and traceability right back to the plantation. 

Coffee is sourced from South America, the Caribbean, Africa, India and Indonesia

Now the company works not only with established coffee house Tomtom Coffee House in London, but also supplies local outlets such as Sabin’s deli in Sherborne, Bramble and Sage in Sutton Montis, Storm in Bournemouth, and other outlets in Oxfordshire and Berkshire including the Wellington Farm Shop at Stratfield Saye.

He was in luck – a contact was selling a roaster. “We found a small roaster which seemed ideal, either as a hobby or as a business venture.”

After meeting Fergus Dowding the couple were convinced to take along some of their roasts to farmers’ markets in Somerset and Dorset.

Charlotte said: “The farmers’ markets were really our start in Dorset, and then everything we went along to seemed to have a snowball effect.”

Giles added: “We would like to grow the business in a manageable way; we are not trying to get large overnight. We try to work with people who are passionate about coffee – they grind beans freshly on the premises and are more interested in quality than cheap beans.”

As he used the cafetiere to froth warm milk, Giles explained about his latest invention which ensures that he can assess the standards he sets for his coffee never fall, from far or near.

Working with a Frome-based engineer, he has developed a Telemetry system, which monitors the coffee machines installed in cafes to make sure they are working properly.

If they are running incorrectly, have a fault or even haven’t been cleaned properly, the system can alert the owners via text or email.

His passion for machines does not end there – he owns several old cars, three motorbikes and four lawnmowers. “I Have an automotive background, and if I wasn’t coffee roasting, that is where I would be.”

The elephant is an Indian motif

To ensure that nothing is left to waste Charlotte has also come up with a crafty idea to reuse the hessian sacks – she has worked with a friend to turn them into cushions and other useful items, which now adorn their home.

It seems that the possibilities are endless for this unique business. When I asked them about the possibility of an in-situ café in one of the farm’s outbuildings, or a coffee training school, both were regarded as very possible development. Click here to link to the Reads Coffee website.

Tests near Abbotsbury, Langton Herring and Ferrybridge have provided fresh clues about the evolution and internal make-up of one of the greatest features of the Dorset landscape.

Results also hint at what might happen to the beach in future, particularly if global warming causes sea levels to rise.

Experts think it may shrink – and the sea may break through it. 

Chesil Beach runs from West Bay to the Isle of Portland. Its sand and pebbles famously vary in size, getting bigger the closer they are to Portland. Coarse sand at Burton Cliffs, “horse beans” near Abbotsbury, and “hen’s eggs” at Chesil, was how De Luc described the beach’s composition in 1811.

It’s been extensively researched since the late 19th century. “Probably the most extensive and extraordinary accumulation of shingle in the world” was how one writer described it in 1902; “an heroic piece of natural engineering” another, in 1919.

But – until now – scientists have been limited in their investigations by the very nature of the beach itself.

It’s probably impossible to dig a deep hole into the middle of a mass of sea-churned cobbles without the hole collapsing dangerously inwards…

But radar waves can go where people cannot.

Geophysical techniques have previously been deployed in places like Norfolk, Denmark and America.

And they have now been used in Dorset by Professor Matthew Bennett and Jeremy Pile from the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University, and Nigel Cassidy, from the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences at Keele University in Staffordshire.

Summary of radar observations

Their findings are reported in “Internal structure of a barrier beach as revealed by ground penetrating radar (GPR): Chesil beach, UK” in the journal Geomorphology, Volume 104 (2009), pages 218–229, published by Elsevier B.V.

The authors suggest a three-phase history. (Note: their technical language has largely been paraphrased).

Phase One: Chesil Beach began as a low, narrow barrier beach, possibly composed of both sand and gravel, that moved (transgressed) back towards the land because it could not keep up with rising sea levels.

Phase Two: The beach grew rapidly and bulked out, despite sea levels continuing to rise, because of a sudden abundant supply of gravel. “Although an off-shore sediment source cannot be discounted, the most likely source is the encroachment of the transgressing shore against the periglacial slope debris found in abundance along the coastal slopes of West Dorset.” In other words, material eroded from the cliffs of West Dorset was swept by the sea round Lyme Bay towards Portland and deposited – according to its size – on Chesil Beach.

Phase Three: The beach humped up (prograded) towards the sea. “This may have occurred during a more stable sea level regime or perhaps a falling regime, in the presence of continued sediment abundance… According to this model… there are three architectural components to the current beach ridge each formed in a different sea level, and sediment abundance regimes.”

Key point: if there had not been enough sediment drifting along the coast, Chesil Beach would most likely have closed in upon the land, and there might well have been no Fleet Lagoon.

Evolutionary model of Chesil Beach based on ground-penetrating radar results

Questions for the future

Prof. Bennett and his co-authors use their findings from their radar surveys to emphasise more strongly than perhaps any previous researchers the interplay of sediment abundance and sea level.

So: what will happen to Chesil Beach in future if sea levels do rise because of global warming?

And: will Chesil Beach be sufficiently replenished by material eroded from West Dorset cliffs or has that process been interrupted by developments like the new harbour at West Bay?

I asked Prof. Bennett for his thoughts (in journalistic terms rather than full-blown scientific ones) and he replied:

“Difficult to say, but I would say that without continued recharge of sediment it will decline in size, and breach; the long shore supply of sediment is unlikely to keep pace with the rate of sea level rise.

“This might be a rather pessimistic scenario and only time will tell.

“As always in these debates, the key question is the rate of sea level rise and the speed at which a system can adjust.

“I would say, however, that change is natural and you can’t set a landscape in stone, and if ultimately the beach does breach then it will simply be another chapter in its life history – you can’t halt change or ageing!”